civileme wrote:
>
> OK let's begin by comparing apples to apples.
>
> Most IDE setups, including Promise, are correctly detected and set up by the
> installer and handled properly by the kernel. This includes ATA/100 or UDMA5.
Sorry about this, but the 7.2 kernel just does not see IDE2 or IDE3,
which is where Promise lives.
This applies to both the installer and the installed runtime. I
don't know where your erroneous information might be coming from.
Worse, neither lilo nor grub know about these IDE channels, so you
MUST at all times have a disk on one of your 2 mobo IDE channels,
otherwise there is no secondary boot loader (lilo gives no error
message from its failure to write it to a non-existent hda) and all
booting will stop at LI. Booting from floppy and re-executing
/sbin/lilo makes no difference - still stops at LI.
> Some folks have more IDE channels than are autoprobed. Drive i
and e,f,g,h
> on 7.2 will
> never be autodetected... It has to be configured after boot, because while
> major and minor numbers exist, it is not autoprobed (Run modprobe -c for
> yourself).
>
> Some folks have streaming problems on CD burning. I know this doesn't sound
> like the same problem, but it appears to be related to one or more of the
> problems I will categorize here.
>
> 1. ASUS A7V -- to detect the embedded Promise controller you have to boot
> the CD in rescue mode and
>
> lspci -vv | less
>
> and scroll through the output. The current advice on mandrakeuser.org is to
> do
>
> linux ide2=0xa000 0x9802
This is totally unacceptable, because there is no way to automate it
that I am aware of since at that point there is no file system. To
have to type in such gobbledigook at every boot is plainly
unacceptable.
> (which sets the controller up to run drives e and f) and the 0xa000 and
> 0x9800 are the first of five hex numbers attached to the irq where the drives
> set up. It is done for ide2 because the oters are already assigned by
> autodetection and there is a need to keep things simple. Of course strings
> to the install kernel could reassign all the drives if desired.
But the reassignment is only for the duration of the install.
> And the
> bootloader is a followup--the append strings must be given to LILO or Grub
> for transmission to the boot kernel.
>
> 2. LG CDRWs seem to have a problem with the ATA/100 backport for 7.2,
> because kernels compiled without them run and burn CDRWs fine while those
> with them balk at setting DMA on the CDRW which can, but not necessarily
> does, break streaming. Results with burning are mixed, sometimes working,
> sometimes not. This occurs whether or not there are any other IDE devices on
> te system and with selected motherboards. Aditional reports are welcome.
>
> 3. Setting DMA on some systems (and this happens on so few that we have
> little data) simply does not work for one or more drives,
This ws true of my old AIR 6ABX motherboard, and is one reason why I
have just replaced it with a Gigabyte GA-7ZXR (and an AMD Athlon
900MHz CPU).
> and we have a
> partition check that hangs the system. It might be related to a CDRW or to a
> Promise ATA/66 Controller. More data is welcome. Particularly welcome is
> any data of anyone able to reproduce this error _without_ WD drives.
I can on that old mobo and IBM drives, but I shifted my CDRW to the
other IDE channel and all problems went away since I always master
CDs to the same partition.
> Unfortunately, this brand seems to be a factor in the failures, and it does
> have hardware differences from other drives. One empirical factor is that
> setting idex=noautotune sometimes stops this behavior (where x is the
> offending channel).
>
> Civileme
--
Regards,
Ron. [au]
